Karate Kid: Legends (2025)

*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Joshua Jackson, Ralph Macchio
written by Rob Lieber
directed by Jonathan Entwistle

by Walter Chaw I have a complicated relationship with John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid. I saw it in the theatre multiple times when I was 11 and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times more on VHS. I did not know that Noriyuki “Pat” Morita spoke without an accent in reality, didn’t trouble myself with the damage this type of sensei character did to my minority in this country, didn’t sense that this was any kind of cultural appropriation, because as an Asian-American kid born and raised in a predominantly white backwater of Colorado, this was and remains ground zero of my culture. Appropriation? Of what? Not Okinawan culture, surely–what’s left of it after our now-eighty-year occupation of it. No, this is American culture, for good and for bad; don’t blame someone else for it. The Karate Kid was my Rocky. (Same director and composer, even.) Mr. Miyagi, together with Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, both from the same year as The Karate Kid (1984), formed this foundational trilogy of Asian tokenism in the heart of the Reagan administration/Blockbuster Generation, during which I was reared. Perhaps not inconsequently, it’s this same period that sowed the seeds for our current neo-conservative Ragnarök. It was like they emerged at the same time on purpose, the Three Wise Men attending Evangelical Christ’s Young Life presumption to the reins of American Empire: the father (Miyagi), the son (Shorty), and the holy ghost (Long Duk Dong) constituting a thesis statement for the only way Asian-American men in their native film industry could be portrayed with the enthusiastic consent of anyone with an opinion. Can I get an “A(sian)men?”

What I should say is that I love The Karate Kid, but I have a complicated relationship with the reasons other people might love The Karate Kid. I’ve talked about this enough. But I was more excited about the 1986 release of The Karate Kid Part II–that “Part” denoting prestige and a seriousness of intent (I’m convinced Avildsen thought he was making the Great American Trilogy)–than I was for Aliens that summer. I became a fan of Peter Cetera’s syrupy theme song and gave my heart to Tamlyn Tomita without a second thought towards what it meant to have her as a replacement love interest for Elisabeth Shue–without a flicker of concern for my Chinese heritage, which had made the Japanese mortal enemies since I was old enough to be indoctrinated into my parents’ racism. I was 13. Things started to shift for me three years later with The Karate Kid Part III: I had aged a lot, mostly in bad ways, and so had this franchise. Despite seeing the return of every major player (Avildsen, Conti, Morita, Macchio, and screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen), it had become ugly, mean, and dispiriting.

Revisiting III for this review, I found a film loaded down with all of the strain of sustaining an unflagging nationalistic arrogance while evidence of a widening wage gap, the death of the New Deal, and our catastrophic interventions in the Middle East in pursuit of oil and natural resources were providing stark counterpoint to our baked-in exceptionalism. You may think I’m overstating it, but consider that the picture’s main villain, Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith), is a millionaire industrialist who spends most of his time on the phone threatening lawsuits and instructing his people to dump “chloride sludge” in Borneo. He bemoans how woke we are about nuclear waste nowadays, orders his assistant to bribe the DA “per usual,” and seems to be living in an eternal Vietnam, where he once forged a friendship with the first film’s villain, John Kreese (Martin Kove). So, in addition to being a somehow more reprehensible Gordon Gekko, Silver is also representative of the booming weekend-militia fad in the United States born from the humiliation of losing a war. There has never been a more American American than Terry Silver.

The original trilogy essentially covers less than a year in the life of its title character, though it was released over a five-year span. Macchio is 27 by the time of III (a year younger than Griffith)–a guy pushing 30, playing a teenager and insisting that his new love interest, portrayed by a 16-year-old Robin Lively, be more irritating little buddy than romantic partner. Score one for Macchio being a good egg. The plot, involving a humiliated Kreese seeking out his war pal to help restart his devalued dojo, is redux’d almost note-for-note in the Netflix series “Cobra Kai”: Griffith’s Silver marvels at the amount of cocaine he’d been doing in the 1980s to spend so much of his time and energy designing the humiliation and brainwashing of thirtysomething teen Daniel. Objectively awful, The Karate Kid Part III is this series’ Rocky IV: a quintessentially ’80s relic, swollen with rage, greed, casual racism, naked aggression, senseless cruelty, and solipsism.

The first film is a reckoning with America’s shameful internment policies during WWII (note Miyagi’s Medal of Honor as central exhibit to that fact), the second with its legacy of colonial miscalculations. The conflict in III is the battle for Daniel’s soul: Is he a child of his sweet, dotty, hippie-dippie mom, or is he doomed to be seduced by the worst instincts of the Me Generation? During the now-standard tournament ending (Daniel must feel as though he’s caught in the gears of an endless replicator device), Silver’s goon literally tortures him with illegal strikes that threaten to permanently disable if not actually murder him. It’s ludicrous, but it’s also an astonishingly on-point metaphor for the unreconcilable tension of how America has typed Asian-American men as simultaneously impotent and dangerously potent. They’re small and ridiculous, except they beat Silver and Creese in war (literal and economic); they’re sexually stunted, except Asian women are coded as hypersexualized nympho-sirens. Silver’s vengeance is the pure expression of mediocre white male frustration: Maybe men from the most populated place on the planet aren’t so flaccid after all. Maybe there is no amount of “cool” a white American man can be that will allow him to become a member of an authentic and interesting culture. This is the honest version of American Psycho. The Karate Kid Part III is helpless to be anything but.

I’ve already said what I have to say about the confounding, sexually violent The Next Karate Kid, and I’m not sure I have it in me to essay the Netflix series “Cobra Kai”, which imagines a bizarre hinterworld populated entirely by people obsessed and involved with the strip-mall karate industry. The best I can say about The Karate Kid‘s 2010 reboot by the increasingly shameless Jackie Chan I’ve said already, so here we are, 45 years after the one that started it all, at Karate Kid: Generations–I mean, Legends, which smooshes two alternate timelines together while doing its best to explain how proudly Chinese Chan again got lassoed into being either mistaken for or actually Japanese in American movies. “Two branches. One tree!” says the CGI/AI-voiced ghost of Miyagi-san circa 1986 to Daniel-san in an outtake from The Karate Kid Part II re-engineered to set up Karate Kid: Legends. He’s talking about how both he and Mr. Han (Chan) had the same origin story somewhere along the line, and incidentally someone should point out that the predominant bridging shot in the first two movies is Daniel sneaking in reverently while Miyagi is being exorbitantly oriental: a tea-coloured elf mystically brewing tea or pruning a tiny tree. You know how it is: Saturday night ain’t gonna rock itself. This is why rich white Gen-Xers have decorative wallpaper featuring rickshaws in their guest bathrooms. Note, too, that this explanation of complementary masters/philosophies is how evil Silver winnowed his way into Daniel’s good graces in The Karate Kid Part III, so no lessons were learned.

In present-day Beijing, Han’s prize student, Li Fong (Ben Wang), is suffering some PTSD from the murder of his brother by local bullies following a, yes, tournament triumph. Concerned about her boy, Mama Li (Ming-Na Wen) moves them to Brooklyn, where Li falls hard for pizza girl Mia (Sadie Stanley) and her goombah dad Victor (Joshua Jackson). Bullies led by oily Connor (Aramis Knight) soon descend on Li, leading him to break his promise to his mother not to fight when he’s challenged to settle his differences in…another tournament. At some point, Han comes to Brooklyn, flies to Reseda to talk to Daniel LaRusso, whom six seasons of streaming tell us has opened a dojo in Mr. Miyagi’s name with former rival Johnny (William Zabka, absent here), and then flies back to Brooklyn to train Li for battle, with Daniel in tow as co-sensei. “Two branches, one tree,” says Chan in his natural accent, making me wonder who did the pidgin for the fake Miyagi of the prologue. Was it Brian Tyree Henry? A quick perusal of the credits failed to enlighten. Oh, there’s also a bit where Li shows Victor how to box so that Victor can compete in an…underground boxing tournament? To pay off his, uh, loan sharks? Working in Karate Kid: Legends‘ favour is how it’s cut and paced a lot like Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. It’s jaunty and light. An early fight sequence positions Wang to be an able inheritor of Chan’s prop-heavy, comedic, hero-who-gets-hurt style, and he himself is a charming, effortless sort with a touch of ineffable star power. Otherwise, it’s such a lightweight and inconsequential movie that for two days I completely forgot I’d seen it.

Karate Kid: Legends is like the IKEA instruction booklet for making a Karate Kid movie: a marvel of abbreviated, gestural storytelling that should be taught in schools as an example of what a perfectly structured script looks like. It’s screenwriting as train scheduling: everything arrives on time, more or less; nothing crashes; nobody is inconvenienced overly; and then you’re home. And unless someone threw up or showed you their dick in the theatre, you will never remember having taken this trip. Karate Kid: Legends is an example of how a film everyone worked hard on, probably in good faith, could end up in one of those giant bins at Walmart mere weeks from now, held up by an astonished-looking 50-year old wondering how in the world they made another one of these without him even knowing about it. What is it? #20? No, sir, it’s only #6, unless you count the “Cobra Kai” episodes, in which case it’s #71. America. Where nothing is so good you can’t mass produce it until it has all the friction, character, and purpose of a suppository. Anyway, Karate Kid: Legends leaves the door open for a sequel.